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. I am disturbed that 20 percent of any sample would justify violence as a legitimate response to an offensive speaker. But I have seen enough surveys to know that you can get 20 percent of a sample to agree with pretty much anything.

Almost all of these survey results are in agreement in two findings: Americans are still more dedicate to protecting free speech than other countries; College-educated citizens are far more likely to defend freedom of speech than less-educated citizens.

let me be candid: Just as I think everyone was too hasty in trumpeting this latest survey, I do not want everyone coming to the opposite conclusion because of this column. Villasenor’s findings warrant some follow-up polling. If his results are substantiated in more rigorous follow-up research, I will be greatly concerned.

what concerns me far more right now is the eagerness with which columnists seized on these findings as vindicating their preconceived belief that today’s college students are just the worst. One of the common laments of modern pundits is that today’s college kids are snowflakes who rely on feelings more than logic to jump to conclusions. But it is the commentators who are leveling critiques against today’s college students by relying on arguments as well organized as a Berkeley free speech week. They are the ones who failed to look more closely at a result that they so badly wanted to be true.

Bloom and others have identified specific mutations that make the nucleoprotein better at resisting the human immune system. The first-wave flu viruses did not have them, but the second-wave ones did, possibly because they had had the time to adapt to infecting humans.

This mutation-by-mutation analysis of the 1918 flu virus would have been impossible to imagine at the time of the pandemic. Doctors then hadn’t even figured out that influenza was caused by a virus. “There’s no way the individual who saved these samples in 1918 had any idea of what could be done to them,” Mehle said. “To my mind, this is a beautiful example of fundamental research.”

Without the pathologist who painstakingly preserved these samples and the museums that kept them for decades before science caught up, our understanding of the 1918 flu would be all the poorer.

When the 1918 pandemic swept through the world, it apparently completely replaced whatever flu existed before. Its modern-day descendants continue to infect us today as seasonal flu.

Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died,

It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.

“People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”

The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that.

Many survivors had to wear painful metal braces on their paralyzed legs or had to be placed in so-called iron lungs, which helped them breathe

In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies.

On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study.Salk’s vaccine was given to 420,000 children. A placebo was given to 200,000. And 1.2 million were given nothing.

She had started at NIH in 1937, had headed testing of vaccines for influenza, and in 1954 was asked to help test the Salk polio vaccine. The pressure was intense. “For weeks she and her staff worked around-the-clock, seven days a week,” O’Hern wrote.“This was a product that had never been made before, and they were going to use it right away,” Eddy had said.She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys.“What do you think is wrong with these monkeys?” she asked a colleague, Offit recounted.“They were given polio,” the colleague replied.“No,” Eddy said. “They were given the … vaccine.”

The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”.

The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous.

The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.

The PLA had its own vaccine specialist, Zhou Yusen, a decorated military scientist at the academy, who had collaborated with the Wuhan scientists on a study of the Mers coronavirus and was working with them at the time of the outbreak.

Suspicion fell on him after the pandemic because he produced a patent for a Covid vaccine with remarkable speed in February 2020, little more than a month after the outbreak of the virus had first been admitted to the world by China.

In May 2020, aged just 54, Zhou appears to have died, a fact mentioned only in passing in a Chinese-media report and in a scientific paper that placed the word “deceased” in brackets after his name. Witnesses are said to have told the US investigation that Zhou fell from the roof of the Wuhan institute, although this has not been verified.

However, there was a no-go area: the Moijang mine. Seven of Hughes’s team headed to the mine in June 2020, including Camping Huang, the PhD student who had investigated the miners’ mystery illness soon after they died.

The investigators also saw communications intercepts that allegedly show three Wuhan institute researchers working at its level 3 laboratory on coronavirus gain-of-function work had fallen sick with coronavirus symptoms in the second week of November 2019, when many experts believe the pandemic began. One of the researchers’ family members later died.

An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory of Dr Shi. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

On November 19, the safety director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences made a visit, according to the institute’s website. He addressed a meeting of the institute’s leadership with important “oral and written” instructions from China’s president, Xi Jinping, regarding “a complex and grave situation”.

A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid. At the time, the authorities were eager to play down the suggestion that the city’s Huanan seafood market was the source of the outbreak; the study was used to show that the initial hotspots in December and January were several miles away.

When the study was first published, the Wuhan institute was not marked on the map it provided. So a report by the US Senate did just that — and found the institute right next to the biggest hotspot in the month before the province was locked down on January 23. The first case in Britain was recorded a week later.

Even before the West was told a mysterious virus was killing people in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities were beginning an information clampdown.

In the first months of the pandemic, there was a strong desire among Chinese scientists to head off to the bat caves in Yunnan to see whether they could find a place where Covid may have originated.

One of the investigator sources said the secret military-funded experiments on the mine virus, RaTG13, began in 2016. At around that time, the Wuhan institute became even less open about its work and mostly stopped revealing any new coronaviruses it discovered. In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.

When they arrived, they were told the Moijang mine was closed, so they sampled bats in another abandoned copper mine nearby. On the first day of their work, police arrived, seized the samples and took them to their station, where they were interrogated and detained for 48 hours.

Officers also went to their hotel and seized the samples they had collected from elsewhere. Even though the team had approval to test in the area, they were ordered to leave. “We did provide documentation to show we were there legally,” said Hughes. “But there was just too much fear and so they didn’t release those samples.”

Most coronavirus experts in China, she said, were too fearful of the consequences to examine Covid’s origins. “They haven’t touched it because of the risks associated with working on it.

The real problem is in how information is obtained. Anthropologists study bones and are forced to draw conclusions based on ancient, fragmentary evidence, and geneticists can obtain complete DNA samples, but not of very ancient organisms. Both are forced to make assumptions based on different sources of evidence. With regard to the accepted tree of life (much as a bridge lacking most of the cables or roadway) it's very much a work in progress!

Clinton's advantage among women has disappeared in matchups against Bush and Carso

The poll suggests Republican women have consolidated their support around their party's front-runners in the last month, and are now more apt to back both Bush and Trump than they were a month ago

The poll also finds Democrats' overall enthusiasm for Clinton has waned

Clinton 'pleads guilty' to being a moderate

The CNN/ORC Poll was conducted by telephone September 4-8 among a random national sample of 1,012 adults. This sample included 930 interviews with registered voters, 395 of whom were self-identified Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents. For results among all registered voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Among Democratic voters, it is plus or minus 5 points.

The government hopes to use the findings to unravel a riddle that will allow Germany to move securely into the next phase of the pandemic: Which of the far-reaching social and economic restrictions that have slowed the virus are most effective and which can be safely lifted?

Other countries like Iceland and South Korea have tested broadly for infections, or combined testing with digital tracking to undercut the spread of the virus. But even the best laid plans can go awry; Singapore attempted to reopen only to have the virus re-emerge.

President Trump is in a hurry to restart the economy in an election year, but experts warn that much wider testing is needed to open societies safely.

Both Britain and the United States, where some of the first tests were flawed, virtually forfeited the notion of widespread testing early in their outbreaks and have since had to ration tests in places as they scramble to catch up

Germany, which produces most of its own high-quality test kits, is already testing on a greater scale than most — 120,000 a day and growing in a nation of 83 million.

Merkel, a trained scientist, said this week that the aim was nothing less than tracing “every infection chain.”

Every 10 people infected with the virus now pass it to seven others — a sharp decline in the infection rate for a virus that has spread exponentially.

The generosity and solidarity on such striking display inside of Europe’s largest and richest economy have been missing in Germany’s response to poorer European nations in the south, which were hit hardest by the virus.

the chancellor’s mixture of calm reassurance and clear-eyed realism — as well as her ability to understand the science and explain it to citizens — has been widely praised and encouraged Germans to follow social distancing rules. Her approval ratings are now higher than 80 percent.

That broad confidence in government has given Germany a tremendous advantage. It is much of the reason a knock on the door by a police officer and strangers dressed like aliens asking for blood can engender good will rather than alarm

“We are leading the thinking of what to do next.”

Its most ambitious project, aiming to test a nationwide random sample of 15,000 people across the country, is scheduled to begin next month.

“In the free world, Germany is the first country looking into the future,”

Nationally, the Robert Koch Institute, the government’s central scientific institution in the field of biomedicine, is testing 5,000 samples from blood banks across the country every two weeks and 2,000 people in four hot spots who are farther along in the cycle of the disease.

In Gangelt, a small town of about 12,000 in northwest Germany, tests of a first group of 500 residents found that 14 percent had antibodies to the virus. Another 2 percent tested positive for the coronavirus, raising hopes that about 15 percent of the local population may already have some degree of immunity.

“The process toward reaching herd immunity has begun,”

t may hold valuable insights for places that lag behind as the pandemic runs its course.

The mortality rate in the town, for example, turned out to be 0.37 percent, much lower than the national rate of 2.9 percent which is calculated based only on detected infections.

“We are at a crossroads,” said Mr. Hoelscher, the professor. “Are we going the route of loosening more and increasing immunity in the summer to slow the spread of this in the winter and gain more freedom to live public life? Or are we going to try to minimize transmissions until we have a vaccine?

“This is a question for politicians, not for scientists,” he added. “But politicians need the data to make an informed risk assessment.”

“I thought to myself if we’re going into lockdown, we need to start working on an exit strategy now,”

The next day, he said he wrote a short pitch to the Bavarian government. Six hours later, he had the green light. It took another three weeks until the test kits had arrived, a new lab was opened and teams of medics started fanning out across the city.

Six days after they first rung his doorbell, a doctor and two medical students came back to Mr. Germann’s apartment, household number 420 out of 3,000.They put on disposable protection suits, gloves and goggles and one of them sat down on a plastic stool they had brought along to take a small vial of his blood. Then they removed and bagged their suits, disinfected the stool and any surface they had touched and left. It took all of 10 minutes.

The problem echoes the country’s catastrophic stumbles early in the pandemic, when a lack of testing allowed the virus to spread widely. Currently, only a tiny fraction of all positive coronavirus tests in the United States are forwarded for further sequencing.

t if scientists don’t know what strains are moving through the population, the mutations that matter may pop up undetected.

For months, scientists have been sounding alarms and trying to ramp up genetic sequencing of test samples, but the effort has been plagued by a lack of funding, political will and federal coordination

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the government is increasing the level of sequencing nationwide.“We have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we’ve done so far,”

Ultimately, the country needs real-time data — similar to the dashboards now used to track daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths — to track variants and their prevalence across the country

“None of that exists right now. We’re incredibly behind compared to other countries,”

The U.S. effort is so underdeveloped that it’s impossible to say exactly how many virus cases are sequenced daily.

The CDC has warned that the variant found in the United Kingdom — which British scientists said could be up to 70 percent more transmissible — could become dominant in the United States by March.

It also recently contracted with four private companies — Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix — to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said.

Illumina estimates that the country needs to sequence 5 percent of its coronavirus cases to detect a new variant when the variant represents about 0.1 percent to 1.0 percent of the country’s case

However, the United States so far has only sequenced about 0.32 percent of its total cases

the country ranks 38th out of 130 countries reporting whole-genome sequencing data.

The United States has sequenced 84,177 samples out of 25.7 million cases as of Friday, according to a Washington Post analysis. By comparison, the United Kingdom, in ninth place, has sequenced 214,000 genomes — almost 6 percent — of the country’s 3.7 million cases.

Unlike the United States, the U.K. invested in genetic sequencing early on in the pandemic, launching its genomics consortium in March with a $27 million investment and a multimillion-dollar boost late last year.

Even before the emergence of mutations such as the variants first discovered in South Africa and the United Kingdom, U.S. experts had been warning for months about the need for a national standard for genetic surveillance.

In May, the CDC launched a surveillance program for the coronavirus called SPHERES (SARS-CoV-2 Sequencing for Public Health Emergency Response, Epidemiology, and Surveillance). But, in practice, the program relied on a haphazard patchwork of academic labs contributing genetic sequencing on a volunteer basis.

A July report by the National Academies of Science said that “poor funding, coordination, and capacity” had led to a “patchy, typically passive, and reactive” U.S. sequencing effort.

Scientists say that a national surveillance program would be able to determine just how widespread the new variant is and help contain emerging hot spots, extending the crucial window of time in which vulnerable people across the country could get vaccinated.

That would cost several hundred million dollars or more. While that may seem like a steep price tag, it’s a tiny fraction of the $16 trillion in economic losses that the United States is estimated to have sustained because of Covid-19.

With such a system in place, health officials could warn the public in affected areas and institute new measures to contend with the variant — such as using better masks, contact tracing, closing schools or temporary lockdowns — and do so early, rather than waiting until a new surge flooded hospitals with the sick.

Experts point to Britain as a model for what the U.S. could do. British researchers sequence the genome — that is, the complete genetic material in a coronavirus — from up to 10 percent of new positive samples

But the U.S. falls far short of that goal now. Over the past month, American researchers have only sequenced a few hundred genomes a day,

In March, Britain started what many American experts yearn for: a well-run national program to track mutations of the new coronavirus. The country invested 20 million pounds — roughly $27 million — to create a scientific consortium that enlisted hospitals across the country, giving them standard procedures for sending samples to dedicated labs that would sequence their viruses.

Using cloud computing, experts analyzed the mutations and figured out where each lineage of the virus fit on an evolutionary tree.

“What the U.K. has done with sequencing is, to me, the moonshot of the pandemic,”

“They decided they were going to do sequencing and they just stood up an absolutely incredible program from scratch.”

In the U.S., a constellation of labs, mostly at universities, have been analyzing coronavirus genomes since the spring. Many of them spend their own modest funds to do the work

“We do know how to dial down the transmission of the virus by a lot with our behavior,” said Carl T. Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “We’ve got a lot of agency there.”

The vaccine alone will not be enough to get ahead of the virus: It will take years to inoculate enough people to limit its evolution. In the meantime, social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing — coupled with aggressive testing, tracking and tracing — might buy some time and avert devastating spikes in hospitalizations and deaths along the way. These strategies could still turn the tide against the virus, experts said.

“It’s a race against time,” said Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist and a member of a World Health Organization working group on coronavirus adaptations.

experts had warned from the start that it would only be a matter of time before the virus became an even more formidable adversary.

The spread of the variant lashing Britain has left some countries vulnerable at a time when they seemed on the brink of scientific salvation.A case in point: Israel. The country, which had launched a remarkably successful vaccine rollout, tightened its lockdown on Friday after having discovered cases of the variant. About 8,000 new infections have been detected daily in recent days, and the rate of spread in ultra-Orthodox communities has increased drastically.

Yet in the course of the pandemic, governments have often proven reluctant or unable to galvanize support for those basic defenses. Many countries have all but given up on tracking and tracing. Mask-wearing remains politically charged in the United States, despite clear evidence of its efficacy.

“Every situation we have studied in depth, where a virus has jumped into a new species, it has become more contagious over time,” said Andrew Read, an evolutionary microbiologist at Penn State University. “It evolves because of natural selection to get better, and that’s what’s happening here.”

Experts say that countries should focus instead on ramping up vaccinations, particularly among essential workers who face a high risk with few resources to protect themselves. The longer the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, the more mutations it might collect that can undercut the vaccines’ effectiveness.

The variants that have emerged in South Africa and Brazil are a particular threat to immunization efforts, because both contain a mutation associated with a drop in the efficacy of vaccines. In one experiment, designed to identify the worst-case scenario, Dr. Bloom’s team analyzed 4,000 mutations, looking for those that would render vaccines useless. The mutation present in the variants from both Brazil and South Africa proved to have the biggest impact.

Still, every sample of serum in the study neutralized the virus, regardless of its mutations, Dr. Bloom said, adding that it would take a few more years before the vaccines need to be tweaked.“There should be plenty of time where we can be prospective, identify these mutations, and probably update the vaccines in time.”

Dr. Rambaut and colleagues released a paper on the variant discovered in Britain on Dec. 19 — the same day that British officials announced new measures. The variant had apparently been circulating undetected as early as September. Dr. Rambaut has since credited the South Africa team with the tip that led to the discovery of the variant surging in Britain.

Public health officials have formally recommended that type of swift genetic surveillance and information-sharing as one of the keys to staying on top of the ever-changing virus. But they have been calling for such routine surveillance for years, with mixed results.

Britain has one of the most aggressive surveillance regimens, analyzing up to 10 percent of samples that test positive for the virus. But few countries have such robust systems in place. The United States sequences less than 1 percent of its positive samples. And others cannot hope to afford the equipment or build such networks in time for this pandemic.

In 2006, the man’s remains were exhumed, but DNA extracted from his teeth yielded no match with a list of people Navy officials thought might be his descendants. With few leads, the scientist who conducted the DNA test, Jeremy Austin, told the Navy about an emerging technique that could predict a person’s ancestry and physical traits from genetic material.

In Australia, forensic scientists are repurposing the technique to help link missing persons with unidentified remains in the hope of resolving long-running mysteries. In the case of the sailor, Dr. Austin sent the sample to researchers in Europe, who reported back that the man was of European ancestry and most likely had red hair and blue eyes.

That alone wasn’t enough to identify the sailor, but it narrowed the search. “In a ship full of 645 white guys, you wouldn’t expect to see more than two or three with this pigmentation,”

This forensic tool, which has been slowly advancing since the mid-2000s, is similar to genetic tests that estimate risks for certain diseases. About five years ago, scientists with the Australian Federal Police began developing their own version of the technology, which combines genomics, big data and machine learning. It became available for use last year.

The predictions from DNA phenotyping — whether a person had, say, brown hair and blue eyes — will be brought to life by a forensic artist, combining the phenotype information with renderings of bone structure to generate a three-dimensional digital facial reconstruction.

“It’s an investigative lead we’ve never had before,”

In the United States, police departments have for years been using private DNA phenotyping services, like one from the Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs, to try to generate facial images of suspects. The images are sometimes distributed to the public to assist in investigations.

Many scientists, however, are skeptical of this application of the technology. “You cannot do a full facial prediction right now,” said Susan Walsh, a professor of biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who developed some of the earliest phenotyping methods for eye and hair color. “The foundation of the genetics is absolutely not there.”

Facial image prediction has been condemned by human rights organizations, including the A.C.L.U., which suggest that it risks being skewed by existing social prejudices.

The same DNA was then linked to dozens of serious crimes across Western Europe, prompting a theory that the perpetrator was a serial offender from a traveling Roma community.It turned out that the recurring genetic material belonged to a female Polish factory worker who had accidentally contaminated the cotton swabs used to collect the samples.

“The families want any and all techniques applied to these cases if it’s going to help answer the question of what happened,” she said.

Such was the case with the mystery sailor. After his genotype was sequenced and his phenotype predicted, a team of scientists across several Australian institutions, including Dr. Ward’s program, used this information to track down a woman they believed to be a living relative of the soldier. They checked her DNA and had a match.

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”

We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

“The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years

a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010

The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.

Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.

The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”

By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.

These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,

Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure

“We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”

teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.

the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.

Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.

How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.

policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.

The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.

“On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”

Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”

These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”

Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress

In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364

Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.

White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.

and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar

A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint

Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?

Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.

Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.

Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.

Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.

The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.

These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.

State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.

Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?

Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years

the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low

Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years

The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.

Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.

The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color

We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions

We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.

In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.

If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.

Some 87 percent of the meat the researchers collected contained either normal or antibiotic-resistant enterococcus, suggesting that most of the meat came in contact with fecal material at some point.

More stark was the proportion of microbes identified that were resistant. Of all the salmonella found on raw chicken pieces sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, while less than 50 percent of the salmonella found on chicken tested in 2002 was of a superbug variety.

One of the oldest genomes studied came from a thigh bone discovered in Goyet Cave in Belgium and given the unwieldy name GoyetQ116-1. Radiocarbon dating pegs the Goyet individual at some 35,000 years old,

Around 1,000 years after the Goyet individual was found, a new culture swept through Europe: the Gravettians. Analysis of genetic material from the time shows that art and artifacts weren't the only things changing. The Gravettians' DNA was significantly different from their Aurignacian predecessors, suggesting that they were a completely separate lineage.

Goyet guy's descendants retreated to the Iberian Peninsula (modern day Spain and Portugal) and waited for their time to come again.

It did, some 15,000 years later. Probably spurred by climate changes as glaciers began to recede, this dormant lineage expanded back into the rest of Europe, bearing a new culture known as Magdalenian.

Not long after that, their genomes started to look like those of people from the Middle East and the Caucasus, suggesting that new arrivals from the southeast were mingling with — and in some cases supplanting — the existing population.

This was a surprise, because researchers used to think that transition happened much later, when Turkish farmers introduced agriculture to Europe some 8,500 years ago.

The genetic analysis allowed researchers to trace the inexorable decline of Neanderthal DNA, which was two to three times more prominent in early human genomes than it is in modern-day ones. This supports theories that early humans interbred with Neanderthals, but that their DNA was toxic to us and gradually weeded out by natural selection over the course of millennia.

A YouGov survey asked respondents from the US, Britain, and several European countries who they thought was most essential to defeating Germany in the Second World War and the US was the top choice in all but the UK and Norway.

An estimated 24 million Soviet combatants and civilians died in the war, compared to 450,000 Brits and 420,000 Americans. Both Britain and the USSR fought longer than the US, which did not declare war on Germany until December, 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Britain and France declared war on Germany in September of 1939, following the invasion of Poland, while the USSR began four years of fierce combat with the Nazis following Hitler's invasion of the country in June, 1941.

While there were no Russians sampled by YouGov, a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of Russians said that the Soviet Union could have defeated Nazi Germany on its own, and nine-in-ten believed the USSR played the decisive role in the war. More Russians polled said that Britain's role in the war was "insignificant", as opposed to "very large".

The study authors acknowledge that S. enterica may have interacted with other circulating pathogens. The method does not rule them out. In particular, the team can only detect DNA, but some viruses carry RNA instead. “If all these people died from RNA viruses, we will never know, at least not with these techniques,

After that, you see for the first time people related to later European hunter-gatherers who have contributed a little bit to present-day Europeans. That happens beginning 35,000 to 37,000 years ago. Then the ice sheets descend across northern Europe and a lot of these populations are chased into these refuges in the southern peninsulas of Europe. After the Ice Age, there’s a repeopling of northern Europe from the southwest, probably from Spain, and then also from the southeast, probably from Greece and maybe even from Anatolia, Turkey

Again, after 9,000 years ago, there’s a mass movement of farmers into the region which almost completely replaces the hunter-gatherers with a small amount of mixture

And then again, after 5,000 years ago, there’s this mass movement at the beginning of the Bronze Age of people from the steppe, who also probably bring these languages that are spoken by the great majority of Europeans today.

Reich: Archaeology has always been political, especially in Europe. Archaeologists are very aware of the misuse of archaeology in the past, in the 20th century. There’s a very famous German archaeologist named Gustaf Kossinna, who was the first or one of the first to come up with the idea of “material culture.” Say, you see similar pots, and therefore you’re in a region where there was shared community and aspects of culture.

He went so far as to argue that when you see the spread of these pots, you’re actually seeing a spread of people and there’s a one-to-one mapping for those things. His ideas were used by the Nazis later, in propaganda, to argue that a particular group in Europe, the Aryans, expanded in all directions across Europe.

This was used to justify their expansionism in the propaganda that the Germans used in the run-up to the Second World War.

So after the Second World War, there was a very strong reaction in the European archaeological community—not just the Germans, but the broad continental European archaeological community—to the fact that their discipline had been used for these terrible political ends. And there was a retreat from the ideas of Kossinna.

one of the things the ancient DNA is showing is actually the Corded Ware culture does correspond coherently to a group of people. [Editor’s note: The Corded Ware made pottery with cord-like ornamentation and according to ancient DNA studies, they descended from steppe ancestry.] I think that was a very sensitive issue to some of our coauthors

Our results are actually almost diametrically opposite from what Kossina thought because these Corded Ware people come from the East, a place that Kossina would have despised as a source for them.

it is true that there’s big population movements, and so I think what the DNA is doing is it’s forcing the hand of this discussion in archaeology, showing that in fact, major movements of people do occur. They are sometimes sharp and dramatic, and they involve large-scale population replacements over a relatively short period of time. We now can see that for the first time.

Zhang: As you say, the genetics data is now often ahead of the archaeology, and you keep finding these big, dramatic population replacements throughout human history that can’t yet be fully explained. How should we be thinking about these population replacements? Is there a danger in people interpreting or misinterpreting them as the result of one group’s superiority over another?

When you see these replacements of Neanderthals by modern humans or Europeans and Africans substantially replacing Native Americans in the last 500 years or the people who built Stonehenge, who were obviously extraordinarily sophisticated, being replaced from these people from the continent, it doesn’t say something about the innate potential of these people. But it rather says something about the different immune systems or cultural mismatch.

Zhang: On the point of immune systems, one of the hypotheses for why people from the steppe were so successful in spreading through Europe is that they brought the bubonic plague with them. Since the plague is endemic to Central Asia, they may have built up immunity but the European farmers they encountered had not.

ut there have been profound and Earth-shattering events, again and again, every few thousand years in our history and that’s what ancient DNA is telling us.

if you actually take any serious look at this data, it just confounds every stereotype. It’s revealing that the differences among populations we see today are actually only a few thousand years old at most and that everybody is mixed.

I think that if you pay any attention to this world, and have any degree of seriousness, then you can’t come out feeling affirmed in the racist view of the world. You have to be more open to immigration. You have to be more open to the mixing of different peoples. That’s your own history.

They were able to reverse engineer the ancient climate by analyzing temperature-sensitive structures of lipids produced by fossil bacteria and archaea living in these bygone wetlands, and preserved for all time in the coal. The team found that, under this past regime of high CO2, in the ancient U.K., Germany, and New Zealand, life endured mean annual temperatures of 23–29 degrees Celsius (73–84 degrees Fahrenheit) or 10–15 degrees Celsius (18–27 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than modern times.

“These wetlands looked exactly how only tropical wetlands look at present, like the Everglades or the Amazon,” Naafs says. “So Europe would look like the Everglades and a heat wave like we’re currently experiencing in Europe would be completely normal. That is, it would be the everyday climate.”

But over 50 million years ago this would have been the baseline from about 45 to 60 degrees latitude. Under this broiling regime, with unprecedented heat as the norm, actual heat waves might have begun to take on an unearthly quality.

closer to the equator in this global sweat lodge, the heat might have been even more outrageous, shattering the limits of complex life. To see exactly how hot, Naafs’ team also analyzed ancient lignite samples from India, which would have been in the tropics at the time—that subcontinent still drifting across the Indian Ocean toward its eventual mountain-raising rendezvous with Asia. But unfortunately, the temperatures from these samples were maxed out. That is, they were too hot for his team to measure by the new methods they had developed.

“Some climate models suggest that the tropics just became a dead zone with temperatures over 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) like in Africa and South America,” says Naafs. “But we have no data so we don’t know.”

“Basically every type of paleoclimate research that’s being done shows that high CO2 means that it’s very warm. And when it gets very warm, it can be really, really, really warm.

“You start really looking into them and you go, ‘Wow. We are dealing with a rainforest.’”

Though there are no trees here at the top of the world, there are tree stumps. And they are around 50 million years old.

One obvious way to reconcile this disparity is by noticing that the changes to the ancient earth took place over hundreds-of-thousands to millions of years and (IPCC graphs notwithstanding) that time won’t stop at the end of the 21st century. The changes that we’ve already set in motion, unless we act rapidly to countervail them, will similarly take millennia to fully unfold

we’re clearly not content to stop at just 400 ppm. If we do, in fact, push CO2 up to around 1,000 ppm by the end of the century, the warming will persist and the earth will continue to change for what, to humans, is a practical eternity

Most worryingly, the climate models that we depend on as a species to predict our future have largely failed to predict our sultry ancient past.

we know methane can actually amplify high-latitude warming, so maybe that’s some of the missing feedback.

“You’ve got alligators, giant tortoises, primates, things like that. We have these big hippo-like animals called Coryphodon. You have tapirs—so you’ve got tapirs living pretty close to the North Pole in the early Eocene, which today—clearly tapirs are not at the North Pole,” she says, laughing.

Clearly we are missing something, and Naafs thinks that one of the missing ingredients in the models is methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which might help close the divide between model worlds and fossil worlds.

We know tropical wetlands pump much more methane into the atmosphere compared to [cooler] wetlands.

The last time CO2 was at 400 ppm (as it is today) was 3 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were perhaps 80 feet higher than today.

Naafs thinks that many of the wildest features of the early age of mammals could be recreated.